Chris Ofili at The New Museum finally makes Contemporary Art Daily. He’s a great painter, but geez, those sculptures are cheeeeeeze ball. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Skate’s has released its 2014 art fair report. In it, the report finds that art fair attendance has dropped significantly for the first year since Skate began tracking art fair attendance in 2007. In total, attendance dropped by 7.4 percent since 2013. If you want to read the full report it will cost $500, but the executive summary has a few surprises. Art Miami is the second most attended art fair in the world. [Skate’s]

Continuing with the subject of money matters, 2014 was a record year for the major auction houses (of course!). Both auction houses saw sales plummet in Asia; it’s not a completely rosy situation. [The Art Newspaper]

We first linked to this yesterday, but it’s now become an ongoing story: London’s National Gallery could be facing extended worker strikes after the institution announced it will be privatizing some of its services. The front of house team, for example, would be outsourced. Naturally, the union that represents the museum opposes this. [artnet News]

A woman in Etobicoke writes about the prejudice she encountered when she ran against former Toronto Mayor and crack addict Rob Ford. [Toronto Life]

The painter Luc Tuymans has been convicted of plagiarism over a portrait of the Belgian politician Jean-Marie Dedecker. [Hyperallergic]

After watching the State of the Union, I can’t recommend wholeheartedly enough Guantanamo Diary, written by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian detainee who has been held by the United States since 2002. His writing can be surprisingly fresh, and unexpected; he often makes metaphors including to celebrities like Charlie Sheen and O.J. Simpson. Guantanamo Diary was released yesterday, possibly in conjunction with the SotU address, whereby President Obama stated once again that the detention center would be taken down. [Amazon]

Writer and art historian Anna Dezeuze weighs in on our Gramsci Monument reporting from last year. Dezeuze, who wrote the book about Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument, thinks that the monument can be approached with a mix of enthusiasm and criticality; til now, audiences have largely been picking sides. [A Blade of Grass]

The long and cosmic story behind Rachel Mason’s opera “The Lives of Hamilton Fish” about two men named Hamilton Fish who died one day apart in 1936. One was a notorious serial killer and the other one was a famed statesman. We’ll have more on this story. [The New York Times]